Inspiration from Watching My Son Practice His Handwriting

(Clearwisdom.net) My son is seven years old and is in the first grade. He attends a calligraphy class and has to practice his handwriting every night. Last night, my son was practicing his handwriting very quickly. After he wrote about a dozen pages, I noticed that he was not making any improvement. After he finished one page, he did not look at it to find his shortcomings, but instead just started in on the next one in a rush. I was watching him and kept correcting his writing posture. Eventually, I could not endure it any more and I told him to stop. I asked him to look at the copybook his teacher had given him. However, he did not listen to me, so I lectured him. He cried, and I wondered why he was so disobedient.

After I calmed down, I recalled a similar situation in my own cultivation. When we write, we should keep searching for our shortcomings and then make corrections. By doing this, we will be able to continually improve our writing skills. If we simply pursue quantity and do not pay attention to rectifying our shortcomings, we cannot make any improvements. If we treat doing things as cultivation, and think that we are cultivating well because we are busy validating Dafa, and if we only regard conflicts happening around us as interference from the old forces but do not search inward and find our existing attachments, we will be unable to truly improve ourselves.

We cannot do things just for the sake of doing things. We should keep improving ourselves during the course of saving all beings. Only when we upgrade ourselves and have strong righteous thoughts can we save all beings. Herein, I would like to remind those practitioners who are busy doing things: do not be so busy doing things that you overlook searching inward. Searching inward is our magic key to improving.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2008/5/10/178146.html

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